Two School Girls

I feel as if I am in another time, seated behind Mayra and Doña María Riso on the school bus. I ask myself how long they have known each other, and imagine them as two girls on their way to class on the bus, placing them both in a childhood memory neither of them possess. They carefully peel the orange-green skin off the piguiballe they are sharing, a small fibrous, bready fruit that in season and for sale in plastic bags on every street corner. In their laps, each carries a bundle of onions, freshly picked and still covered with earth, a secondhand mop, household necessities in a recycled plastic bag. Their conversations and their silences are pregnant with an unspoken confianza; they could be discussing anything, from the weather, to the coming harvest, to the cooperative of which they are president and vise-president, to their own and their community member’s lives and children. They are at once innocent, comforting, grounded, tried but not hardened, wise but not schooled, and infinitely humble. They are women who have lost children and family members to war, disease, poverty, who never graduated elementary school (or perhaps even began it), but who can cure stomach ailments with plants from their backyards, and who run families, farms and communities according to theories of deliberative democracy, solidarity, inclusion, and progress without need of an academic framework or vocabulary. They are soft and eternal, the image of mothers and caretakers, in bodies and histories that show them to occupy those identities as only a small part of their multi-faceted selves. They are foundations and pillars of strength, whose always genuine smiles make you feel that despite poverty and consistent 20 hour days, they will salir adelante, everything will be alright, and they would love it if you would come and stay with them along the way.

Today I witnessed these women shining in the act of moving their communities forward, taking advantage of new opportunities, resources, and contacts. We spent the day at a meeting of the directive boards of the 21 groups of GMAS (Groups of Women in Solidary Savings). The 50 or so participants come from communities all over northern Nicaragua; in all of these communities Cecocafen has a presence. The purpose of the groups, which are backed by Cecocafen and an International NGO CoffeeKids, is to provide women with economic opportunities through creating joint credit programs. In addition, these groups get women out of the house, meeting each other, and engaged in active economic activity which increases family income as well as women’s economic independence.

The purpose of today’s meeting was to go over the bylaws that are being created. I sat in a group of nine women, going over the seven page proposal document. I sat amazed. These women, many of whom have had no official schooling and most of whom didn’t finish elementary school, were arguing about interest rates, capitalization, international exchange rates, and their rights to borrow. They were debating what was in their interest, their communities interests, what things should be left up to individual group bylaws, and what should be included for all. One could see, as the conversation continued, some of the more timid women beginning to speak up, encouraged by the confidence of those more outspoken. This is really what empowering individuals to make their own decisions and destinies looks like, and I feel so privileged to get a peek at it. An interesting, inspiring and productive day, both for these women as community leaders and organizers, and for me, as a mere bystander.

Now, sitting in the last seat on the bus, I feel that I have a unique view, a window into a world full of pain, poverty, and want, but bursting with goodwill, generosity, hospitality and power. The bus is full of people who know each other, who are cousins or siblings or neighbors, helping to pass up or down hundred pound sacks of cucumbers, or crates of eggs, or a new coffee depulper, brought on the bus over the muddy highway from simple wood and mud homes to markets in Matagalpa and back again. All the while, looking well-kempt in their knee-length skirts, their dark hair pulled back in identical loose buns, Mayra and María smile and continue their quiet conversation, integral parts of the bustling but slow-paced world that revolves the way it does around and because of people like them.

El entierro

The sun beat down on my hat, as I walked along wearing the skirt I have only pulled out twice since I’ve been here. All around me, people moved along silently, some in dress shirts and nice shoes, others in T-shirts, all scarcely talking, many looking at the ground.
The truck lumbered slowly forward, trying to ensure that all of the mourners were keeping pace over the three miles of rocky, dirt road, full of mud puddles from last night’s rain. People stepped around and over them, each foot in front of the other bringing us closer to the cemetery. All of the children were in the back of the truck, squatting around the plain light blue wooden box that held the body.
Before this morning, I reflected, I had never actually seen a dead body, never been to a burial, never been present at the time of someone’s death. But here I am, I thought, accompanying the 100 members of this small farming cooperative to the culmination of yesterday’s tragedy, to the today’s end point of what will be many days of pain and recovery.
The young man who died, I didn’t meet in my week in the community, but he was well known. 20 years old, Wilfredo came home drunk from the independence day festivities in San Ramón, and having found his girlfriend there with another guy, he took it upon himself to drink from a bag of pesticide. The first I heard of it was when Xiomara, the 15 year old daughter in the Blandino house, where I am living, came to ask me if I had anything to calm nerves, for the mother of the boy who “se envenenó” (poisoned himself). I didn’t.
Over the next two hours, he was rushed on foot (there are no cars in the community) to a clinic three miles away, and then returned. “Murió,” was Aura’s only response when we asked her what had happened to him, she being soaked from the rainy walk, from supporting his mother as they walked the three miles back, four of the community’s men carrying the body, as before they had carried the boy.
Now, we walked along in the funeral procession, towards one of the few cemeteries where one still doesn’t have to pay to bury someone. As we moved along the road more and more people joined the line, some thoughtful, some crying, some seemingly following the only out of the ordinary event on this Thursday afternoon. The casket was lowered into the ground with what could be mustered of ceremony, a few biblical verses, and shocked expressions all around, as I imagine exist at many funerals. All around looks of shock and surprise, resignation, hiding the fountains of pain that well up inside of one at such unbelievable and unsuspected tragedies. Standing there, I was struck by the rapidity of change, of death; no one there had thought to be at a burial 24 hours earlier.
I am reminded again and again that this experience is about much more than learning about coffee, or cooperatives, or even the countries where I am. I am learning a lot more about what it means to be human, to be compassionate, and interested, and present. To say I am sorry to a mother that has just lost her son, in a tight-knit community that I barely know.

shoes

How many pairs of shoes do we each have? What is necessary, proper footwear?
As I travel along, I am carrying with me four pairs. Four. This seems to me like a ton! One pair of tennis shoes, one pair of flip flops (for the shower), real sandals (the kind you can actually hike in), and one pair of rubber boots (the mud here after the rain makes anything we call mud season back home look like nothing). At home however, I have probably thirty pairs of shoes (to my great embarassment), just right for different occasions, clothes, activities and events.
However, here in the campo, the shoe of choice (or of economic necessity) is a plastic flip flop, often tied where it has broken, too big or too small for the wearer, and worn for everything. From cooking in the dirt floored kitchen, to walking the four miles to another community or the nearest store, or for playing football with a flat ball with your friends outside the school.
Often times within the family, these shoes may be shared, as there may actually not be enough pairs to go around. One child may wear them to school when they go in the morning, giving them to the other at lunchtime so he can attend class in the afternoon. If it is raining, there is not a worry about open-toed footwear, mostly because there is nothing to change into. Running in the field next to the school is the same; barefoot is the way to play the game after a while, the sandals not only fly off when one kicks the ball, but also break too easily.
So this has all put me to thinking about luxury, about necessity, about shoes. Wondering what it is about that we produce and consume shoes for all occasions, specialize them not only for sports but for types of sports, while kids here run around and cut their feet playing barefoot in order to preserve their plastic flip flops. It seems so connected yet so different and distant, I either don’t know how to, or more likely don’t want to make the connection between these two realities. The unfairness and triviality of the one to the other seems too great to be reckoned with or made sense of.
And I am left wondering, what does it mean to go back to my world with thirty pairs of shoes?

Bathing with pigs

Well, not quite literally, though almost. This week, I made my first move to a new community, from El Roblar, a two hour bus ride from Matagalpa, to La Pita, which is a half hour bus ride from Matagalpa and then a 2 mile walk from San Ramón, where one is left by the bus. This, among other things, has made me realize that I have too much stuff, even though everything for my year currently fits in a large backpack and a daypack. So, I am putting myself to thinking some more about what else I can send home… What in the world made me think I needed three pairs of pants, or an entire first aid kit, or a sweatshirt, or 8 pens? As we can see, I am really getting down to it…
One of the things that has made me giggle in this new community is the slightly different bathing situation. Whereas in my last house, there was a small brick room with running water one dumped over one’s head with a bucket, here the water is pumped through a hose into a structure of four wooden posts enclosed by black plastic tarps. I have some issues because I am much taller than everyone in the family here, and thus have to crouch while I shower, or expose my upper body to the wide open world! Directly next to the shower area, is the pig sty. This means that right along side my showering, I can hear the happy pigs oink-oinking as they eat, play in the mud, or do whatever else they do. Just gave me a chuckle when we think about bathing with pigs.
The community here is much more isolated, the cooperative has only 16 members (one woman), and all the land is held in a collective. This means that each member is responsible for some acres him/herself, but that the community as a whole is responsible for the production of the coffee. But how do they ensure that everyone works? That everyone puts in the same effort? How do they do it?
Well, it seems that each member is paid 25 córdobas a day when they work in the coffee. A book is maintained of who went to work when. If one doesn’t go, they simply don’t get paid for that day. However, since the land is held in a collective, the overall revenues of the coffee sales, (after each member is paid), is divided evenly among the 16 cooperative members. I have yet to discover how this all works and how everyone feels about it, but it is interesting to see the difference between here and the other community. There, all the land is held under an individual title, as opposed to here, where it is a collective title.
Here it is also clearer that a lack of knowledge is impeding some progress. The cooperative’s president, in whose house I am staying, is less aware of the channels and funds available through the UCA and CECOCAFEN for community projects, and thus says that the community has not seen the social proceeds from Fair Trade. On the other hand, he also explained to me that CECOCAFEN does not know the community so well, the president has never been here, and only a few director’s of the cooperative have been to the office in Matagalpa. So I am getting to see a little more the distance between base cooperative member and international cooperative team. Interesting and enlightening the communicative path through the ranks…

Extended Familiares

I have just returned from Estelí, Nicaragua, and a visit to the family of Dora and Mayra. Three of Dora’s sons, Mayra’s brothers, currently live there, and it is the original home of the Gamez’s with whom I keep house at the moment.
Buanegre, Dora’s oldest son, works now as a lab technician in a private clinic. He studied medicine in Cuba on scholarship during the Sandinista years. Her other son Leonel, owns a jewelry shop, where he and his wife Celia work with their sons to produce jewelry and encourage others to become Jehovah’s Witnesses (something neither Dora or I understand very well, hehe). Her youngest son, Walter, works in one of the many cigar factories located in Estelí, which became home to the majority of Cuban tobacco enterprises after the Cuban Revolution.
Today I accompanied Dora to the House of Heroes and Martyr’s, which while a good experience, was phenomenally dark. This is a museum, run by mothers of young men and women killed in the revolution. The one room museum is about 30 by 60 feet, and is full of photographs and belongings of all the young people killed by Somoza’s guard or by the Contras. Walking the walls with Dora was particularly difficult, since as an Estelíana, she was able to point out her nephew, her children’s classmates, a young man who wanted to marry Mayra, a boy who she saw down the street just before he was killed. The whole experience was far more than enough to bring home the reality and tragedy and waste and vision and dedication present in the revolution, in a painful and acute way.
But what has impressed me most here, is how I have been taken right in, by Dora’s sons, their neighbors, their families. Buanegre gave Dora and myself the bed in his one room apartment, Walter gave us a tour of the factory, Leonel and his wife showed me how to make a ring and then gave it to me. They have all been more than happy to share, to talk, to ask questions, to engage.
In Spanish, the word for relatives is ‘familiares’. Familiars, and that is really how people treat you. Despite having met me ten minutes before, I am being treated as family all the time. What more could one ask for?

Good Planning

Obviously there is a lot to be said for chance, for systems that are screwed up, for life’s difficulties. I am in fact here examining how it is that people are creating a new system which works better for them, since much of what we operate in is well, pretty much fucked.
However, despite this, it is interesting to see and think about how one’s individual life choices also play a big part in how oppressed or unoppressed, how comfortable or uncomfortable, and how many choices one has. I have been thinking about this a lot as regards Mayra, the head of the household where I have been staying for the last month. She is 38 years old, has four sons, a house, 17 manzanas of land, a small store, and is the president of the cooperative. Although she definitely struggles at times to make ends meet, she manages, and manages well.
Being placed in the same situation, or worse, as many of her countrymen and women, Mayra has struggled and overcome, and has planned all along. Despite the fact that she only attended school until the fourth grade, when she went to work harvesting tobacco for the international cigar companies based in Nicaragua, Mayra thought to start saving a portion of her wages every paycheck by the age of 14. At this time, she, like her mother and countless others, was earning barely subsistence wages working as a cook in a hacienda kitchen on a coffee plantation. She woke up at 1 am to start making the first of three daily rounds of 1400 tortillas, for all of the haciendas workers. However, with the money she saved, at the end of the Sandinista period, she succeeded in purchasing her own small farm with the money that she had saved.
At Age 17, she had her first son. Eight years later, she had her last, and opted to have the free operation that would keep her from having more children. Fortunately, this has limited the size of Mayra’s family enough that she had been able to, with help from the coop, support all of her children in going to high school, an incredible feat in a country where once again the illiteracy rate is approaching 50%.
At the times of the coffee crisis, Mayra also continued to work her coffee, trying to up the quality even as the international price for coffee plummeted. After three years in the early 90’s, when the price of coffee rose again, she was able to earn enough off of her coffee sales to purchase a few more manzanas, rather than having to work to recoup coffee plants that had been left idle for the last few harvests.
Each of these examples shows foresight even in the face of great obstacles. By saving Mayra was able to secure herself and her family a place to live. By limiting the number of children she was to have, she made herself more able to provide for them, unlike some others, who, with 21 children, openly admit that they have no thought of being able to send all of them to school. In addition to this, persevering with her crops despite huge hardship also paid off for Mayra, as she just continued her work, undeterred by her then desperate situation.
How much of one’s success is determined by life circumstances? By external factors? How much depends on making good decisions, on thinking ahead? It is obviously impossible to know, and the questions have innumerable answers, but it is also clear that it is easier to deal with 4 children that 14. Where is the line between individual responsibility and social responsibility? If the government were to make it possible for women to limit the number of children they have, (which it doesn’t), is it the fault of the parents that they have too many children to be able to send them all to school? So many questions, all about human individuals and individual responses and situations, with no single question, and no single answer…